Geeking At School

I got a question the other day, which I had not researched before: what do we have to do for students under 13 years old that we want to give Google Apps accounts to? I knew that we probably had to get parent permission, but didn’t really have much to back that up. We do restrict email for student accounts to within the domain--students can only send and receive email to and from other students and teachers. This is for further protection, at least for those in the lower grades. The following is some research I’ve done on the subject. By no means does this take the place of legal counsel, and I haven’t run it past a lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge this is accurate. Two laws that we have to comply with when it comes to students and online data are COPPA and FERPA . COPPA Google Apps’ website says this about COPPA : How does use of Google Apps affect compliance with the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA)? Your school assumes the responsibility for complying with COP...

Had an exciting training session the other day, in which I didn't participate much in as it was lead by a couple of teachers, but got me thinking: peer training is important. It gives teachers no excuse to not accept the reality that other teachers, within the SAME district, are doing exciting and relevant things when it comes to technology, to which (hopefully) they have the same access to. Much more buy-in when the information is coming from a peer/colleague.

Here's a quick video I made on how to use keepvid.com to download a YouTube video for offline use. Update: While there are many tools available for downloading YouTube videos, apparently downloading them is actually against YouTube's Terms of Service (5B)  (thanks Tyler), unless videos specifically provide a 'download' link. This does make it extremely difficult for teachers to share YouTube videos with their classes when YouTube is generally filtered on school networks, but hopefully districts (like ours) see the educational value of many YouTube videos and are working on providing for access to teachers and staff. If you do follow these instructions, please be sure that the uploader specifically grants you the right to download the video.

Stumbled across this talk that was given in May 2011 by Dean Wells, titled Impact of Cloning and Virtualization on Active Directory Domain Services . Quite the incredible talk, and I sure wish I had seen this before I started rolling out Active Directory and got off to a false start. This is stuff every AD admin should know, and gets fairly technical at some points but is well worth the time investment to watch if you have an hour or so.

Blog, how I’ve neglected you. Not for lack of things to write about, but crazy things have been happening lately. I’ve been designing and implementing Active Directory and everything that goes along with it (GPOs, file storage, backups, redundancy...and the list goes on). I have learned quite a bit from this so far and would love to share with you what I have learned. Lack of time restricts what I can share right now, so perhaps I’ll share a little tidbit of information I learned very quickly: Never, EVER, under any circumstances, restore a virtual domain controller from a snapshot. This most likely will result in a USN rollback event, in which all domain controllers in the domain think that they’re the most recent version of the AD database, causing replication to completely fail. It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to recover from a USN rollback. Trust me, I tried. My solution? Completely delete and redeploy Windows 2008 servers and setup AD completely fresh. And never rest...

School starts Wednesday. This blog post is more about self-affirmation of what went on this summer than anything else, but I think it's worth sharing. Man, the summer has gone by way too fast. Here's a list of some of the things we accomplished this summer: Replaced all our Novell servers with Cisco routers at our sites, with standardized DHCP ranges etc. Moved all services and file storage that were running on Novell to other servers. Setup, cabled and configured two Dell Poweredge R710, two Dell Powerconnect 6224 switches and an Equallogic PS4000x SAN for virtualization. (Thankfully, Dell helped us out with that. Of course, we paid for it.) Installed and configured VMware vSphere on the two host servers and SAN. Setup several Windows Server 2008 VMs to act as our primary and secondary internal DNS (integrated with AD) and swapped out our old DNS servers. Changed our domain name to something much easier to type, which we are still experiencing the ramifications of ...

It's been a while since I last posted...figured I owed it to people to give them an update of what's been going on. First, archiving Google Apps email with Lightspeed TTC. This is by far the most popular subject that people who visit my site are searching for (according to Google Analytics). Of course, 'most popular' means all of three or so people who are interested in the subject. But there is enough interest out there that I'd better keep talking about it. After moving to Google Apps for Education, our initial goal was to use Postini for archiving email for the first year to make life easy for us, and then look into possibly moving to our own email archiving system in-house, which would be Lightspeed TTC email archiving. However, while this is a great idea (and still one we may consider) our plans and hopes were dampened by us actually having to USE Lightspeed's email archiving system to retrieve emails. Now, chances are we didn't do this right. And the l...